Outbuildings might actually be the ideal application for this kind of thing, and there's some off-the-shelf stuff that can solve some parts of the problem. We built a greenhouse a while back that I set up to do as much passive temperature regulation as possible... south-facing lean-to design, with transparent polycarb walls but a metal insulated roof. Idea being that you maximize solar gain in winter when the sun is low, minimize it in summer, and the insulated roof helps retain some of that heat in winter. I also added a couple 50 gallon barrels filled with water and concrete pavers on the floor for thermal mass. Last piece is that you can pick up automatic window openers that use an expanding fluid to open the windows when it gets hot enough.

It's surprising how comfortable it stays in there pretty much year-round.

The overall semi-passive temperature control concept seems like something that deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten. I used to have a town home with no AC, but with a house fan that would blow air up through the attic... sounded like an airliner in the upstairs hallway when we turned it on. It was actually surprisingly effective, but to keep things comfortable in the summer we had to turn the house fan on at the right time in the evening, turn it off at the right time in the morning, open/close downstairs windows to draw in cool air, and then keeping the blinds closed on windows when the sun was on that side of the house.

It's the kind of thing that's annoying for humans to keep track of, but trivial to optimize with software. The hard part would be in having the actuated systems to control the vents, windows, blinds, and fans, and then software to integrate it all. Some of those things exist, but they're expensive so the ROI generally isn't there. A system like yours though basically fully automates the stuff I was doing with the house fan.

Have you ever crunched numbers on the savings? I would bet in terms of cost efficiency a simple system could pay for itself in a couple years, but in terms of energy efficiency I would think you're using at least an order of magnitude less energy than active cooling.

To be fair, we had plenty of that even back in the glory days... but the noise has stayed constant while the signal seems to have dropped off with most topics.

I'm curious, do you think the semi-passive cooling system will still be useful at beginning and end of summer, even if the night get too warm? Savings obviously aren't going to be as attractive as using it all through the summer, but I would hope there are still seasons where the system is worth running.

This was a really interesting post in the spirit of classic slashdot. I have no mod points, but I salute you for keeping the dream alive.

My personal take after reading The Idea Factory (really good book btw) was that it was actually a combo of a monopoly with close government accountability that produced some remarkable results.

Basically, Bell had a monopoly, and in anti-trust hearings ~early 1900's it was argued that it was necessarily a monopoly from a technical perspective in order to have standardization of communication across the country. Congress reluctantly agreed, and granted Bell the ability to maintain the monopoly under the constraint that they must continually show that continuing it served the public interest.

Bell Labs was a big part of that - funneling profit into Bell Labs, and providing research and development that helped create the entire information age absolutely served the public interest (development of the transistor and cellular networks being two of the largest innovations coming out of that institution).

My personal take is that what we really saw was an unusually effective success story of checks and balances. Bell had strict accountability and a burden to prove that their existence served the public interest, and the courts and congress served as a check on business practices that would have really abused that monopoly. At the same time, you didn't have the situation we have with NASA, where congress is actually trying to impose rocket designs on NASA - that's very different, where instead of congress serving as accountability, congress is trying to drive pork into their districts. We should be striving for the Bell Labs model in more places IMO - business is allowed to do what business does best and works to maximize profit, and then government acts as accountability to make sure the profit motive isn't driving abusive behavior and the organization still serves the public interest. Big, powerful institutions in business and government should be set up to provide accountability to each other.

We've seen this story before - mortal enemies Lockheed and Boeing joined forces to created United Launch Alliance. For a number of years the company did impressive things with Delta IV and Atlas V reliability and put a lot of national asset satellites in space, but they are still stuck in the historical way of doing aerospace engineering - very low risk tolerance, very expensive, very slow. They are aiming to match where SpaceX was 5 years ago as opposed to where SpaceX is going.

It would be surprising to see anything different from merging a bunch of European aerospace companies - the hard part isn't hiring up a bunch of aerospace engineers and funding a project, it's having a focused goal and actually aiming for full reusability on an aggressive schedule. Legacy aerospace companies don't tend to think that way, so this is probably just going to combine 3 slow companies into one bigger, slower company.

Progress depends on the type of cancer, but overall research is making a substantial difference: Between 2000 and 2021, the cancer incidence rate per 100,000 people fell by 5.7%, while the mortality rate dropped by 27.5%. https://usafacts.org/articles/...

Recent immunotherapies like this one really do look like breakthroughs that will accelerate that rate of improvement. For instance, 2 minutes of googling showed this one reduced or eliminated tumors in 82% of patients such that no further treatment was needed, and that's across several different types of tumor-based (solid) cancer like TFA refers to. https://www.cancer.gov/news-ev...

Thanks for the K'Breel deep cut. If only I had mod points for you.

This seems pretty similar to the concept of a rental cooperative - a group of people form a non-profit or other org structure that basically just splits upkeep costs evenly between all the residents. It's a really sensible way to do things, offers a lot of the same benefits of things like cooperative credit unions instead of banks. The problem is just that it requires paperwork, organization, and there's not huge money in it for anybody in particular. On the other hand, it's immensely profitable (and gives huge tax benefits) to acquire property as a landlord.

It would be really interesting if someone put out some policies that streamlined and incentivized rental co-operatives, or if someone found a business model to allow the concept to become much more widespread.

Power (GW) is just as important for battery storage as energy (GWh), you need to have sufficient power to cover the 95th percentile worst-case load, and sufficient energy capacity to cover that load for the 95th percentile worst-case duration or something like that. Tesla touts the power capability of the powerwall more than the storage quantity, I suspect it's the larger engineering challenge... after all, to add storage capacity you just add cells, but to add power throughput in that application you need to engineer a better DC/AC converter.

There are also going to be a ton of other trade-offs involving upfront cost, maintenance cost, longevity and degradation, etc. Non-technical people like politicians and 90% of the people they are speaking to don't understand or care about any of that. When it gets to a high political level, these things always going to distill that complexity into a single metric that shows "we're 20% of the way there" which is all the non-technical people really care about anyway... whether it's power, energy, dollars, or something else doesn't matter, it's "how much progress have we made" that's the real takeaway here.

You should take a closer look, Netflix has some decent games. Into the Breach for instance is pretty good if you like turn-based tactics, great game design and retro feel to the graphics.

Not remotely true, unless you pursue something trivial and pointless (which, to be fair, a number of people do).

If you're going to college, you should do something difficult. If your coursework isn't teaching you to do something today that you weren't able to do yesterday, you're in the wrong classes. If you are regularly challenged in that way by your classes, then by definition, you are going to emerge from the experience as a more capable human being. That's one of the best investments you can make in a lifetime. On the other hand, if you choose a major because it's easy and gives you lots of spare time to party, there's a high risk that it won't pay for itself and all you're doing is saddling yourself with an extra mortgage payment for no reason at all.

I know my karma is going to be obliterated but here goes: Agile is a lot like democracy... it's the worst software management technique except all the others that have been tried. And I get that some folks may do Agile without scrum, but the general objections being raised are objections against the thing as a whole, which is why I'm addressing Agile, with scrum being the particular subset of Agile practices that people are taking issue with.

At the end of the day, people need to talk to each other to get things done, including communication between developers and non-developers. Agile facilitates that in probably the most objective and least stupid terms I've seen. Ideally scrum means that you get the right people in the room at the same time to discuss blocking issues and quickly identify anything that is preventing work from happening. It's easy for a developer to spend days working on something that a tech lead or another developer might be able to short-circuit, a daily check-in should mean that, at most, a single day is burned rather than multiple.

The core problem being addressed is rework. In the classic workflow, a user/lead/PHB says "Go build me this". Developer goes and builds it, brings it back, PHB says "that's not what I meant". If you're paying attention, the entire structure of Agile and scrum is to mitigate that problem - communicate better and earlier, and then do smaller chunks of work with more frequent review so that you pivot as early as possible. You try to have a day of rework, or maybe two weeks, rather than years of rework which has happened way too often with large software projects historically.

Show me something that is consistently working better than scrum, and I'll shut up and use your better method. I don't give a shit about scrum or agile for its own sake. I just haven't seen anybody come up with a better way of organizing a big pile of complicated work.

It always cracks me up that conservatives fancy themselves John Wayne rugged individualists, until it becomes a matter of putting up with things like rainy weather or less convenient packaging, whether for the sake of saving money, protecting the environment, or even stopping our dependency on foreign oil from dictators. As soon as someone suggests a *fully voluntary* effort to do something that's healthy, clean, cost-effective, and better for the nation, the party that cultivates a tough guy image starts whining about how unthinkable it is to do things like walk outside or use an umbrella. The Netherlands has famously awful weather, and also the highest biking rate in the world - they could teach us a thing or two about being rugged.

I miss Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, who was the epitome of an outdoorsman, started the entire idea of environmental conservation, and actually saw inconvenience and discomfort as a valuable thing that would improve our character as individuals and a nation.

Despite your story being strange and only marginally related to the article and discussion, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.